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How David Quammen’s Writing Career Was Influenced by his Time Fishing in Montana

jversteegh — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 12:00:32 +0000

This story update is part of the����ԹϺ��, a series highlighting the best writing we’ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read “The Same River Twice,” by David Quammen,��here.

David Quammen is Zooming in from the room where it happens, in Bozeman, Montana. It’s where he’s written his three National Magazine Award–winning articles and his bestselling and critically acclaimed books on topics like island biogeography and extinction, including 2022’s , which is about the origins and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Quammen—a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award—worked for 15 years in the 1980s and 1990s as ��ԹϺ��’s Natural Acts columnist. In significant ways, his is the voice that defined ��ԹϺ�� back in the early days of the magazine.

In the grainy Zoom window, I see Quammen’s walls of shelves, heaving with books, and also a large, empty glass tank.

“I’m in here with Boots the python,” he says, as if it’s totally banal to share office space with a large snake. “That’s his tank.”

Ah, the tank is not empty. That’s cool. And a little terrifying.

“Oh, he’s a sweetheart,” Quammen says. “My wife, Betsy, came downstairs one day about five years ago and said, ‘Don’t get mad at me, but—’ You know how those conversations begin. Betsy says, ‘Don’t get mad at me, but I’ve adopted a python.’ Betsy and I are snake people. I said, ‘What species?’ That’s kind of what passes for our collaborative decision-making.”

Boots is a “very gentle” ball python, Quammen says. “He, like most of our dogs and like the cat, is a rescue.” When Quammen lets Boots crawl around the office, the snake will sometimes slither up and into hidden spaces in the shelves.

“Their favorite habitat is rocky walls. A ball python can go into a niche in a cliff or a mud bank and wedge itself in there like a ball, and it makes it hard for a leopard or a baboon to pull it out and eat it. Boots wedges himself in my bookshelf, and I have to delicately figure out: Which book do I take out next in a way that does not hurt him, bend any of his scales in the wrong direction, to loosen him up a little bit? Eventually, he just sort of falls into my hands.

“He’s only bitten me once, and it was by accident. He was very embarrassed.”

We digress, perhaps. But a conversation with Quammen always contains multitudes: Darwinism, connubial negotiation and bliss, dedication to the literary and the true, and a fierce and gregarious curiosity, with Montana often in the wings. Let’s digress a bit more: had he not bought a used Volkswagen bus in England, and had George McGovern won the U.S. presidency in 1972, it’s very possible Quammen might never have ended up in Montana at all.

He grew up in Cincinnati and got into Yale, where he studied literature and wrote a novel, . He then won a Rhodes Scholarship and headed off to Oxford to earn a graduate degree, writing his thesis on the works of William Faulkner. He obtained the VW bus with money earned from the novel. But in May 1972, Quammen recalls, Richard Nixon ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor in Vietnam, and “within about 24 hours I left the Rhodes without permission and came back to the U.S. to work for McGovern’s [anti-war] campaign. After McGovern was squashed in November, I promptly went back to England and found that the head of the Rhodes Scholarships hadn’t written me off.”

Quammen got his Oxford degree and then convinced his friend Dennis to ship the VW to a dockyard in New York. Following an unsatisfying stint in Berkeley, California, Quammen decided to drive the bus “to Montana, filled with Penguin Classics and a portable electric typewriter. And a very cheap fly rod, which I soon ran over and replaced with a better cheap fly rod. I arrived in Missoula on September 12, 1973. A significant day in my life.”

OUTSIDE: I came to work at the magazine the year after you wrote “The Same River Twice.” I don’t know if you remember, I was your fact-checker back in those days. I read this essay, and from that moment on I loved your writing. The bones of the story have everything to do with how you came to ��ԹϺ��.
QUAMMEN: In 1981, Steve Byers, E. Jean Carroll, and I were all trying to break into magazine writing from Ennis, Montana, the little town we were living in. I was 33; they were a few years older. We heard that the editor of ��ԹϺ�� magazine was coming to Montana to schmooze with writers, and we thought it’d be great if we could get a shot at meeting that guy and pitch stories to him.

From a phone booth in Bozeman, with a handful of quarters, I cold-called ��ԹϺ�� in Chicago and asked for John Rasmus, editor in chief. My heart was racing. I was nervous. My mission was to say, “If you come to Ennis, Steve and I will take you fly-fishing on the Madison River.”

This young, casual voice comes on the line: “Hi, this is John.” I say, “Hi, John Rasmus. You don’t know me.” I do my little spiel, and he says, “Oh, OK. Cool.”

Steve and I taught him to cast a fly line in my side yard. Then we took him fishing, and we made sure that he caught some fish. By about sunset on this stretch of the Madison, he was landing a 16-inch rainbow trout.

We took him back to the farmhouse where Steve and Jean lived, and we cooked steaks and drank whiskey. By the end of the evening, we were all best friends. At some point I said: I got a story idea for you. I want to write a piece about what’s good about mosquitoes. John said, “Is anything good?” But in the sober light of day he said, “I’m assigning this to you, right?” I mailed the essay off in a manila envelope and thought, What’s going to happen?

What happened was he accepted it and offered you a job as columnist for a slot already known as Natural Acts.
That was the only time, I think, that I ever actually pitched ��ԹϺ�� an idea. After that I’d just send him a piece, usually on time, but at the last minute: “Here’s an essay on sea cucumbers.” “Here’s an essay on giant Pacific octopus.” “Here’s an essay on why crows get bored.” Which is because they’re too intelligent for their station in life.

When I was doing the column, I tended always to look for some kind of synergy between elements that were unexpectedly combined, but when you put them together… well, son of a gun. I had taken some courses in zoology at the University of Montana when I lived in Missoula. I had taken a course in entomology, another one in aquatic entomology, and another one in ichthyology. I was interested in how spring creeks worked, the fact that they maintain a constant temperature and therefore have a 12-months-of-the-year growing season and can be very productive. This creek behind Steve and Jean’s house was a spring creek.

And then Steve and Jean came to an end. I had so revered their union that, when they split, it gutted me. Then, several years later, I was noodling up a column.

I had that spring creek idea, but it was only half of a column. I needed another half. I needed the yang to that yin. That creek that I fished on with Steve, and the end of their marriage and the end of our special moment, the three of us in that town, became the yang of this piece. I always thought of that time as—there’s a wonderful sentence at the very end of , Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of Paris. He says, “This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”

One thing I enjoy about the essay is that there are no identifiers—I don’t know where it is except that it’s in Montana. As I reread it recently, I thought about how we are now so information saturated. This piece is almost allegorical—the opposite of online culture.
It’s a very particular, very personal story, but I wanted it to have some sort of universal dimension. I wanted it to have legs. I want to give myself credit for an instinct that not naming the town, not naming the people, not naming the specifics would give it a little bit of permanence. I was describing science with great care and, I hope, precision, but also connecting it with things that were very unscientific—either artistic or simply emotional.

I love that ��ԹϺ�� was a place where you could do that, and everybody had the good sense to keep letting you do it.
I did between 152 and 155 columns, something like that. All those wonderful people at ��ԹϺ�� just letting me do any damn crazy thing, as long as I could make it work and get it in on time. It was a fool’s paradise.

But you started out wanting to write fiction, right?
I wanted to be a novelist. I had taken one science course in college, a biology course, and it was not a good biology course. Didn’t even mention Charles Darwin.

I discovered Faulkner when I was a sophomore at Yale, and I became obsessed with his work. I studied him with a great teacher and a great friend to me, Robert Penn Warren, who knew Faulkner, and who was himself a southerner and a towering American man of letters. When I was a senior, I was rewriting what became my first published novel, To Walk the Line.

But I was a middle-class white male from a happy childhood in Ohio. The world didn’t need that guy to be a novelist. When I got to Montana I started reading nonfiction. Voraciously.��For the first time.

What prompted you to do that?
I had always been interested in the natural world, but I had been in New Haven and then Oxford—not places where the natural world is very strongly present. I got to Montana, and I got back to the natural world. I was interested in feeling the cold and the snow and feeling the flow of the rivers. But also, I was interested in thinking about it. I was interested in ecology and evolutionary biology. I started reading Darwin. I started reading Heraclitus. I started reading Herodotus. I started reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I started reading every which way: Loren Eiseley and J.B.S. Haldane and Mary Kingsley and Annie Dillard and others. And I saw people doing things with nonfiction that were every bit as creative and imaginative as fiction, and much more creative and imaginative than 97 percent of novels.

I want to ask about your books on pandemics, which are both highly literary and diligently reported. You were prescient on this topic, having published , your 2012 book about the rise in zoonotic diseases that transmit dangerously from animals to humans. A decade later came Breathless, in which you argue persuasively for the zoonotic theory of COVID-19 and against the theory that the virus escaped from a virology lab in Wuhan, China.��
One story is the imagined story of a lab leak, and the other is the inferential story of a zoonotic spillover. There is a lot of empirical evidence to support but not finally prove the idea that COVID originated with a zoonotic spillover. There’s a whole historical and scientific context for that. There are pieces of immediate evidence that support that idea.

There’s no empirical evidence to support the lab story. But it is a very, very powerful, enticing story. And that is why it has legs, in my opinion. One of the things that they argue on that side is, “Well, if this came from a zoonotic spillover from a bat, why haven’t we found the original virus in the bat? It’s been four years now. That’s very suspicious.”

Well, no. The problem is they don’t know anything about the history of zoonotic diseases. With the Marburg virus, for example, it took 41 years to find the bat. With Ebola it’s been 48 years, and we still don’t have the answer. It is not mysterious that the last section of evidence in the structure of empirical support for zoonotic spillover of COVID hasn’t been found.

Are you working on a book now?
Yeah. My desk is covered with files, files, files, books, books, and files. I’m working on a book on cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon. I’ve been incubating this book for 17 years.

How is cancer evolutionary?
There is a school of thought that I stumbled across in 2006 or 2007 that says to understand cancer, you have to understand it from a Darwinian perspective. Every tumor is a population of cells. As a tumor begins, the cells start mutating more and more. As a tumor grows, it’s a population of cells that vary from one another with genetic variation. And they’re competing. They’re competing for space. They’re competing for blood. They’re competing for oxygen, for other resources that allow them to grow. And when you have a population of variant individuals competing for resources in order to survive and replicate themselves—does that sound familiar? You turn the crank and you have evolution by natural selection.

So why does chemo so often not work? An oncologist prescribes a drug, and I don’t know how much cancer you’ve experienced in your family or your life—

I had breast cancer, and my husband died of lymphoma.
All right. Ouch. Yes. So an oncologist says, “We’re going to treat this with chemo. This is a good drug.” And the chemo knocks down the cancer for six months or so. You get some improvement. And then the cancer becomes resistant to that drug, so you’re forced to use a different drug. Why does it become resistant? For the same reason that a field of grasshoppers becomes resistant to the insecticide DDT. You hit the grasshoppers with DDT one year. You kill off 99 percent of the grasshoppers, and 1 percent of the grasshoppers happen to have genetic resistance to DDT. Two years later, your field is filled with grasshoppers again. This is cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon.

If we live long enough and are lucky enough, we’ll all die of cancer. Lucky enough because it is a result of, among other things, but importantly, the cumulative number of cell divisions that you have. But here’s a question: Why do whales not get cancer?

Whales?
It’s a mystery. It’s called . Whales live a long time, and they have lots and lots of cells. Their cells are not larger than ours, they just have more of them. If you trace a linear curve, whales should be dying of cancer in early middle age, all of them, and they’re not.

Are there any tiny animals that don’t get cancer?
Yes. The naked mole rat, which lives in burrows in the Middle East. It has hardly any fur. It’s blind. It lives underground. A naked mole rat lives to be 20 or 30. A mouse lives to be two. There are cancer biologists who have whole colonies of naked mole rats and have been studying them for 40 years.

This conversation makes me want to be huge. Or very small.
Lisa, just remember: ��ԹϺ�� in the 1980s, that’s what it was like, when we were very young and very happy.

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Can You Step in the Same River Twice? In Montana, I Learned the Answer.

jversteegh — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 12:00:30 +0000

You’re about to read one of the����ԹϺ��, a series highlighting the best stories we’ve ever published, along with author interviews, where-are-they-now updates, and other exclusive bonus materials. Read Lisa Chase’s interview with David Quammen about this feature here.

I have been reading Heraclitus this week, so naturally my brain is full of river water. Heraclitus, you’ll recall, was the philosopher of the sixth century B.C. who gets credit for having said: “You cannot step twice into the same river.” Heraclitus was a loner, according to the sketchy accounts of him, and rather a crank. He lived in the town of Ephesus, near the coast of Asia Minor opposite mainland Greece, not far from a great river that in those days was called the Meander.

He never founded a philosophic school, like Plato and Pythagoras did. He didn’t want followers. He simply wrote his one book and deposited the scroll in a certain sacred building, the temple of Artemis, where the general public couldn’t get ahold of it. The book itself was eventually lost, and all that survives of it today are about a hundred fragments, which have come down secondhand in the works of other ancient writers. So his ideas are known only by hearsay. He seems to have said a lot of interesting things, some of them cryptic, some of them downright ornery, but this river comment is the one for which Heraclitus is widely remembered. The full translation is: “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.” To most people it comes across as a nice resonant metaphor, a bit of philosophic poetry. To me it is that and more.

Once, for a stretch of years, I lived in a very small town on the bank of a famous Montana river. It was famous mainly for its trout, this river, and for its clear water and abundance of chemical nutrients, and for the seasonal blizzards of emerging insects that made it one of the most rewarding pieces of habitat in North America, arguably in the world, if you happened to be a trout or fly-fisherman. I happened to be a fly-fisherman.

One species of insect in particular—one “hatch,” to use the slightly misleading term that fishermen apply to these impressive entomological events, when a few billion members of some mayfly or stone fly or caddis fly species all emerge simultaneously into adulthood and take flight over a river—gave this river an unmatched renown. The species was Pteronarcys californica, a monstrous but benign stone fly that grew more than two inches long and carried a pinkish-orange underbelly for which it had gotten the common name salmonfly. These insects, during their three years of development as aquatic larvae, could survive only in a river that was cold, pure, fast-flowing, rich in dissolved oxygen, and covered across its flat bottom with boulders the size of bowling balls, among which the larvae would live and graze. The famous river offered all those conditions extravagantly, and so P. californica flourished there like it did nowhere else. Trout flourished in turn.

When the clouds of P. californica took flight, and mated in air, and then began dropping back onto the water, the fish fed upon them voraciously, recklessly. Wary old brown trout the size of a person’s thigh, granddaddy animals that would never otherwise condescend to feed by daylight upon floating insects, came up off the bottom for this banquet. Each gulp of P. californica was a nutritional windfall. The trout filled their bellies and their mouths and still continued gorging. Consequently, the so-called salmonfly so-called hatch on this river, occurring annually during two weeks in June, triggered by small changes in water temperature, became a wild and garish national festival in the fly-fishing year. Stockbrokers in New York, corporate lawyers in San Francisco, federal judges and star-quality surgeons and foundation presidents—the sort of folk who own antique bamboo fly rods and field jackets of Irish tweed—planned their vacations around this event. They packed their gear and then waited for the telephone signal from a guide in a shop on Main Street of the little town where I lived.

The signal would say: It’s started. Or, in more detail: Yeah, the hatch is on. Passed through town yesterday. Bugs everywhere. By now the head end of it must be halfway to Varney Bridge. Get here as soon as you can. They got here. Cab drivers and schoolteachers came too. People who couldn’t afford to hire a guide and be chauffeured comfortably in a Mackenzie boat, or who didn’t want to, arrived with dinghies and johnboats lashed to the roofs of old yellow buses. And if the weather held, and you got yourself to the right stretch of river at the right time, it could indeed be very damn good fishing.

But that wasn’t why I lived in the town. Truth be known, when P. californica filled the sky and a flotilla of boats filled the river, I usually headed in the opposite direction. I didn’t care for the crowds. It was almost as bad as the Fourth of July rodeo, when the town suddenly became clogged with college kids from a nearby city, and Main Street was ankle deep in beer cans on the morning of the fifth, and I would find people I didn’t know sleeping it off in my front yard, under the scraggly elm. The salmonfly hatch was like that, only with stockbrokers and flying hooks. Besides, there were other places and other ways to catch fish. I would take my rod and my waders and disappear to a small spring creek that ran through a stock ranch on the bottomland east of the river.

It was private property. There was no room for guided boats on this little creek, and there was no room for tweed. Instead of tweed there were sheep—usually about thirty head, bleating in halfhearted annoyance but shuffling out of my way as I hiked from the barn out to the water. There was an old swayback horse named Buck, a buckskin; also a younger one, a hot white-stockinged mare that had once been a queen of the barrel-racing circuit and hadn’t forgotten her previous station in life. There was a graveyard of rusty car bodies, a string of them, DeSotos and Fords from the Truman years, dumped into the spring creek along one bend to hold the bank in place and save the sheep pasture from turning into an island. Locally this sort of thing is referred to as the “Detroit riprap” mode of soil conservation; after a while, the derelict cars come to seem a harmonious part of the scenery. There was also an old two-story ranch house of stucco with yellow trim. Inside lived a man and a woman, married then.

Now we have come to the reason I did live in that town. Actually there wasn’t one reason but three: the spring creek, the man, and the woman. At the time, for a stretch of years, those were three of the closest friends I’d ever had.

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I Went to Alaska to Learn How Carhartt Pants Save Lives

jversteegh — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 15:23:07 +0000

It started as spillover from a different assignment. In late 1999, GQ sent New York–based writer Natasha Singer to Talkeetna, Alaska, to cover a “bachelor auction,” a party originally put on by the Talkeetna Bachelor Society during the long, dark, cold winter, to attract women to the remote town at the foot of Denali. After the trip, she contacted ��ܳٲ��’s executive editor at the time, Jay Stowe, with a brief but enticing pitch that went something like: I heard about this local affair called the Carhartt Ball, where weathered Alaskans swap wild stories of survival—angry walrus attacks, inadvertent dips in icy rivers, accidental immolation—all thanks to their Carhartts. Interested?

She had us at “angry walrus attacks.” The vision of hardy frontier folk stepping up to the mic to regale friends and neighbors with gonzo tales of death-defying rescue by outerwear was too good to pass up. So we sent Singer back to Talkeetna to cover the annual event. (Which is still going strong, despite a COVID-19 interruption in 2020.) At the time, the ball consisted of locals modeling Carhartt’s spring line at the VFW hall, followed by a storytelling competition at a nearby bar. Not only was it sponsored by Carhartt, but the clothing manufacturer’s main man in Anchorage served as the event’s emcee (decked out in a “bespoke brown Carhartt tuxedo with black lapels,” natch). Singer’s story ran in the magazine’s 25th anniversary issue, in October 2002, under the rubric “Revelries of the Rustics.”

This wasn’t the first time Singer had traveled to a remote locale for ��ԹϺ��, and it wouldn’t be the last. As a roving correspondent for the magazine in the early 2000s, she documented a cockeyed attempt to return Keiko—the killer whale star of Free Willy—to the sea off the coast of Iceland, hopped a ride on a U.S. Coast Guard cutter attempting to break through the ice-choked Northwest Passage, and slogged through the jungles of Thailand in pursuit of a group of WildAid activists trying to halt an illicit trade in endangered species. (“Oh, my God,” she said, recalling that reporting trip, “did I tell you about the anti-leech socks?”) These days, she writes about technology and education for the New York Times business section. Stowe recently caught up with Singer about her globe-trotting experiences.

OUTSIDE: Maybe I shouldn’t say this, since I wrote it, but your story ran under my favorite headline: “These Pants Saved My Life.” It’s straight to the point, prominently employs the word “pants,” and has the added value of being true. How did you discover the Carhartt Ball?
SINGER: There’s this saying about Alaska—if you’re a woman looking for a guy, the odds are good but the goods are odd. And in Talkeetna especially, the odds are better but the goods are odder. I had been sent there to do a story on the bachelor auction, and I started to hear these really interesting stories, episodes where people got into trouble and their Carhartts—miraculously, like the Shroud of Turin—seemed to have magical properties that were healing or lifesaving. People were telling real stories, like: This tree fell on me, but I was wearing my double-knee Carhartt pants, so I didn’t get hypothermia. I survived for three hours. This was normal discourse, and the pants were the common denominator.

I’ve always thought there’s a reason people go to live in Alaska, and it’s mainly to get away from the rest of us in the lower 48.
We all have tribes, and we all have things that distinguish who gets in the tribe and who doesn’t. The Carhartt epic is a way of saying, “OK, we have a shared lived experience, even if yours is, you know, dropping your lighter on your pants and flaming out the crotch.” It’s a common thread that binds people and demonstrates their Alaskanness.

Was it easy to get people talking?
One of the things I love about being a reporter is when people share their passion for the things that matter to them, whether that’s expertise about the bearded iris or how to butcher a roadkill deer. So even in standoffish places, I find that if you’re authentically interested, people will show you something, and then it will be super cool. And you’re naturally going to say, “Oh, that’s amazing.” And they’ll say: “Well, you want to see the next thing?” And then it’s three hours later, and they’ve shown you every single pair of Carhartt pants in their closet.

At one point you meet Ted Kundtz, a “jack-of-all-trades” in Talkeetna, and over eggs and reindeer sausage he scoffs at the tourists who’ve tried to buy his Carhartts right off him. He says: “They called the years of wear and tear I put in them ‘authentic character.’ ” He’s very perceptive. Like, these Alaskans know they’re being ogled just as much as the grizzlies.
Essentially, he was saying: These are real. The tourists want the veneer of reality, but they don’t want to live our lived experience. Which—it’s tough to live in Alaska, right? It’s cold. And the winters are harsh. And it’s still our frontier—that is, if you don’t live in downtown Anchorage. I got what he was saying. People want frontier cred without actually putting the years into the effort.

How did you get your start?
I studied Russian in college and wanted to go off to Russia. Even though I was not fluent, I ended up going to Moscow and staying for a decade. This was in the 1990s. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, and it was inexpensive to travel because everything was in rubles. So I was going all over. I was covering human rights for The Forward, business for USA Today, and fashion for Vogue. It was this crazy decade. You know: If it’s Monday, this must be Siberia! If it’s Tuesday, I’m doing a segment on Good Morning Kazakhstan! And then I was asked to help start Vogue Russia. I’m grateful I was able to cover those former Soviet republics, but at some point you have to either decide to stay forever or go home. Then I went back to New York and nobody wanted me to write about New York. I was Ms. Strange Places.

One of your first ��ԹϺ�� stories was about an American billionaire’s attempt to release Keiko back into the wild. In another you hitched a ride on a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker as it busted through the Northwest Passage—a trip made possible by climate change. When you think of those pieces along with the Carhartt Ball, the range is impressive. Ridiculous, sublime, daunting—you were able to do it all.
The various stories I did with ��ԹϺ�� had an adventure quality, but they also had a quality of observation. It’s what we now call lurking, right? Watching what’s happening and then explaining it. I felt lucky to be in that position.

We have this romantic notion of icebergs, but the Northwest Passage, it’s just miles and miles of bumpy, ugly ice. As I wrote: “Unlike freshwater icebergs, sea ice is not romantic. It is neither majestic nor soaring. It does not give off that otherworldly spectral glow of pure whiteness born of glacial snow. Its verticality does not threaten ocean liners with a predatory, awe-inspiring loom. It is not prehistoric in origin. Quite the contrary, most sea ice is younger than a decade. It is flat and flawed. It is often pockmarked, dirty with algae, and lumpy with protruding hummocks.”

I love that paragraph, and I still don’t know how I got away with writing it, or how anybody signed off on it. I’m working at the Times now, and I don’t get to write paragraphs like that very often. So the other thing I’m grateful for is that ��ԹϺ�� pushed me to write at the top of my range.

I was very happy to sign off on that.
We still have to talk about my friend from high school who wrote a letter to the editor of ��ԹϺ��. She was like: I read the story by your writer Natasha Singer. I went to school with a Natasha Singer, and I’m wondering if it’s the same person. Because in high school, we didn’t think of her as an ��ԹϺ�� girl. We thought of her as an inside girl—as in, inside the house.

I’m glad we were able to help you defy the opinions of former classmates. You’ve been able to report on a lot of amazing things that go on in the world.
It’s like when we said that those pants saved Alaskans’ lives. In a way, ��ԹϺ�� changed my life. To be able to write those stories, report them, and meet all those people and get to do all those things—real stories, where there were people telling us real things that really mattered—it was a gift to be able to do that.

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Behind the Scenes of the Funniest Story ��ԹϺ�� Ever Published

jversteegh — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 11:00:26 +0000

“The King of the Ferret Leggers,” which appeared in the February–March 1983 issue of ��ԹϺ��, tells the story of a Yorkshireman named Reg Mellor who, for sport, puts two ferrets down his pants and then stoically endures as the rodents run and claw, bite and dangle, for five-plus hours. Details on the activity, which peaked in the 1970s, are a little sketchy, but it appears that all you needed was a field for spectators to stand around in, some self-appointed judges, and at least one contestant. Oh, and the competitors had to go commando: no underpants.

The author of this tale was Don Katz. Forty-two years later, he’s recounting the legend of this piece to me while sitting inside a majestically repurposed church in Newark, New Jersey, global headquarters of the company he founded: , the world’s leading creator and seller of audiobooks and other original content. Katz recently stepped back from his longtime position as CEO, but he remains active and keeps an office in town. He also remains close to Newark Venture Partners, a social-impact early-stage investment fund, and Audible’s Global Center for Urban Innovation; he established both to focus on solutions to urban inequities, after moving Audible to Newark in 2007.

��ٳ�’s Rolling Stone ID from 1977 (Photo: Courtesy Don Katz)

Hold on a minute: the guy who wrote a piece about ferrets gnawing a man’s privates is the same guy who created Audible? Yes, and a common thread runs through ��ٳ�’s writing career and the business he built: a love of story.

In late 1982, Katz submitted the ferret-king piece to John Rasmus, then ��ܳٲ��’s editor in chief. This was back in the magazine’s primordial days, when it was still finding its voice. Rasmus loved it. Then the artwork came in—a graphic image by , the famous Rolling Stone artist, showing Reg on the field of battle, clad in baggy pants that appear to be spraying blood.

Rasmus: “I said, ‘Uh-oh.’ ”

Katz had talked Steadman—his good friend and colleague from their days as Rolling Stone contributors in England, where Katz had moved to study at the London School of Economics before getting started as a writer—into illustrating the piece. Delicately, Rasmus nestled the article and its vivid depiction into the issue, running it with a brief subhead (“A True Story”) under the rubric “Revelries of the Rustics.”

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this piece became talismanic for the magazine. “It gave us all kinds of good reasons to do stories like ‘Ferret Leggers,’ ” says Rasmus, who in 2017 wrote a tribute to it for ��ܳٲ��’s 40th anniversary issue. It also helped establish that an ��ԹϺ�� story could be literary, visceral, and funny at the same time, often involving a protagonist who must do a particular thing because, to paraphrase George Mallory, it is there to be done.

“Ferret Leggers” is so good that it was stolen many times, even before the internet made that easy to do. People typed it up, put their name on it, and got it published. Katz, who for years worked as an award-winning magazine writer and author, spent more time than he wanted to cease-and-desisting these thieves.

��ٳ�’s decision to write for a living, and in particular his ability to hear and employ the oral traditions of storytelling in his work, was born in the early 1970s, when he studied at New York University under , the author of the classic novel Invisible Man. The idea of what Ellison called the “musicality” of the spoken word surely was lodged in ��ٳ�’s head while he labored to bring Audible to life. It wasn’t easy. The company would eventually become a huge success, but after the dot-com bust of 1999, Audible traded for as little as four cents a share. It took a decade to make a profit.

��ٳ�’s two career arcs reminded me of something he wrote about ferrets back in ’83. This creature, he observed, has one very good trait: “a tenacious, single-minded belief in finishing whatever it starts.”

Katz in upstate New York, reporting an early ��ԹϺ�� article called “Bert, a Dawg” (Photo: Courtesy Don Katz)

OUTSIDE: As a character, Reg Mellor is hilariously over-the-top, and I think some readers today may wonder if he treated his athletes with the respect and care they deserved.
KATZ: Well, Reg would have said that the real athletes were the tiny cohort of humans who subjected themselves to ferrets being put in this uncaring and potentially cruel situation. My story set out to be a literary satire, pitting legendarily tough Brits from a specific county against equally tough animals, which, as few readers would have known, had been raised and deployed for generations to chase other animals out of holes for the benefit of hunters. There’s no doubt that there were plenty of people around England more than 40 years ago—when there was a movement to outlaw ferrets as pets due to various attacks that happened inside homes—who gave me statements and assertions that became my description of exaggerated ferret fury. But ferret legging was a clearly unacceptable treatment of sentient beings. From my view—as someone who’s aware of emerging science about animals and the father of a vegan animal-rights activist—it’s good that this is no longer a thing, which leaves my literary excursion into irony as a cultural artifact of another time and place.

How did you get the idea to write “The King of the Ferret Leggers”?
When I got to England in the mid-seventies, there was this satirical, couched-in-gossip magazine called Private Eye. I saw a squib in there about someone named Reg Mellor, who had retired in disgust from a competition called ferret legging because he was able to do it for so long that everyone in the stands got bored and left.

I pulled the page out of the magazine and thought: That is so weird. Someday, I’d like to find out what that is.

I bounced the idea off Ralph Steadman, who was already famous in the United States for his Rolling Stone work with Hunter S. Thompson. I kind of put us together as a package. For whatever reason, I got the OK from ��ԹϺ�� to do it.

The story was published, and it fairly immediately became a cult thing. People passed it around at cafés, as if we were living in the days of Victorian poetry. Writers sent it to each other, and it started to have, you know, buzz—and all sorts of unintended consequences for me.

Such as?
Right around that time, I had this idea of trying to write a big story about Nike. The head of Nike, Phil Knight, had never given interviews. I sent him “Ferret Leggers.” He loved it. I got the OK to enter Knight’s world, and that experience grew into my 1994 book, Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World.

I’ve read that “Ferret Leggers” was stolen a bunch of times.
The story comes out, and I go back to writing books and other magazine articles. Then I get a phone call from a friend who was talking to another friend in Germany who was raving about this hysterical article in a major German magazine, about a man in Yorkshire, England, who puts ferrets down his pants.

“You’ve been plagiarized,” he said. I lawyered up and was paid triple damages—which wasn’t that much because of how small my ��ԹϺ�� fee was. But at the time I needed the money!

In the late 1990s, when the Unix-based Internet was becoming the World Wide Web, I became aware that the story was available online with other people’s bylines on it. I remember writing to some person at Carnegie Mellon University who was trying to publish it under his name.

I said, “You might not know the concept of intellectual property, but I wrote that. I basically live on that story being republished.” And the kid wrote back, saying, “You old fart, you should be happy that anyone even cares about a story you wrote in 1983.” He attached various manifestos that said information should be free, which was one of the early ideas defining the Internet: to wipe out professional-grade content in favor of the crowd’s content.

Later, when Audible was designing the first download service for content—and inventing the first digital-audio player, which came out almost five years before the iPod—I asked our engineers to create an encryption system that would at least cow the people who wanted to steal others’ work. I said at the time: “If we’re going to sustain the professional creative class through this digital transformation, there have to be some protections. Otherwise, no one’s ever going to get paid.” That was key to Audible’s formation, and a focus on powerfully composed and artfully performed words was fundamental during the 27 years I ran the thing.

For many people the writer-to-tech-CEO trajectory might be confusing at first, but it makes sense that the common link is a love of words.
That’s right. Audible was an idea and a company culture led by a writer. And the truth is, I daydream in prose.

How did you get the elite venture capitalists who backed you to believe in a writer who wanted to create a media category based on technologies that didn’t yet exist?
Well, some of them didn’t believe. But because I’d studied and written about businesses large and small, I knew that getting a business going required capital, and I would need to deploy language and stories that would overcome perceived risk. I discovered, for instance, that 93 million Americans sat in traffic jams driving to and from work—which meant there were hundreds of millions of hours per week that Audible could fill with a premium service offering self-selected entertainment, education, and information. This was a key point in the original business plan. Consumers could “arbitrage” their time, I argued, by programming their own listening time. They could make dead time come alive and get to work smarter than the person in the next cube.

That’s a daunting leap.
The technology-invention risk, on top of the market risk, was real, but I used my journalistic training to be honest about what I didn’t know, and to find expert fellow pioneers and employees to supplement that. The realities of financial and cultural success took much longer to achieve than I expected, but from the beginning I thought—and preached—that digital technology could create an Audible-spawned media category alongside music, books, and other printed material, along with all permutations of film and video. I didn’t go so far as to attribute this to what I learned as an English major mentored by Ralph Ellison, or go on as I did later about why Stephen Crane and Mark Twain wrote like Americans because of their ability to listen to the polyglot sound of Americans talking. But these things were never far from my thoughts.

You also had to invent the technology and the hardware to make it happen. You had to invent the Audible MobilePlayer and a way to download encrypted files. And last but not least, you had to persuade the book publishers to license the rights to books.
Despite the efficiencies of never being out of stock in digital, and the price benefits of no physical packaging, resistance from the publishing establishment was intense. There remained an aristocratic strain within the publishing elite that did not want this change.

This seems like the right time to tell you that, by studying your vast oeuvre—magazine pieces, books, and Audible itself—I’ve identified themes that run through your work. May I try them out on you?
I love that you did that.

My first theory is that you’re drawn to people—you may be one of those people—whom the mainstream considers to be, uh, crazy. People who have outrageous ideas and pursue them. Reg Mellor is such a person.
Definitely true. I also think of them as relentless people who just don’t give up on ideas. In my case, the shift from writing to creating Audible was, even to myself, something of a mystery.

Two more themes: you’re drawn to endurance and domination. Both apply in “Ferret Leggers,” but also in ��ԹϺ�� stories like your profile of the father of fitness, Jack LaLanne, which was memorably called “Jack LaLanne Is Still an Animal.”
Jack was such a fascinating, bloody-minded character. He was 80 when I spent time with him, and I think of him often now, as I navigate the realities of aging alongside continued aggressive physical activity.

And, obviously, in the story of Audible, which hung by a thread several times between 1995 and its sale to Amazon in 2008. By 2023, according to one statistic I saw, Audible dominated the U.S. audiobook business, with nearly two-thirds of the market.
There are many ways to define business success, and Audible has clearly achieved a startling level of it by traditional metrics. But what has always mattered to me are the lives that Audible touches in so many ways across listeners, writers, actors, and employees. But there’s no question that if you want to pursue ideas that others may view as unlikely, you better need to win and fear failure in ways most others do not.

Do you have any regrets?
That I was never good enough to be an NHL player. I’m a lifelong hockey player. I would have traded in any of it to be a professional.

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The Story of ��ܳٲ��’s Funniest Story

jversteegh — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 11:00:10 +0000

What’s stranger than a story about people stuffing ferrets down their pants? How about that story leading the writer to create one of the largest, most successful digital media companies, ever. When����ԹϺ����ܲ��The King of the Ferret Leggers, by Don Katz, more than 30 years ago, it became an instant classic and is now considered the funniest story ��ԹϺ�� has ever published. But what people don’t know is that writing the piece began a long, strange journey that ended with Katz founding audio giant Audible.

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That ’70s Guy

jversteegh — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 13:00:18 +0000

This story update is part of the����ԹϺ��, a series highlighting the best writing we’ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read “We Dressed a Modern Man Like an Outdoor Dude from the 1970s and Set Him Loose in the Wild,” by Eric Hansen here.

The subhead read: “��ԹϺ�� was born into a far-out bicentennial world of Coors, cutoffs, and bright orange tents. Maybe there’s a reason they say, ‘Don’t look back.’ ”

But we did anyway. For the magazine’s 30th anniversary, celebrated in 2007, ��ԹϺ�� sent Eric Hansen on simulated time travel to 1976, the year the magazine was founded, by having him dress like a dorky outdoorsman from that era and do his wild and crazy things in the modern world of Boulder, Colorado. Hansen was the perfect choice for this embarrassing assignment. Having started as an intern in 1999, he’d proven his mettle with his inaugural feature story: poaching a first descent of Kilimanjaro on a pair of Big Feet, the short little skis you see on bunny hills. Sadly, Guinness did not recognize the achievement.

Starting in late 2006, Hansen became ��ܳٲ��’s Out of Bounds columnist for more than three years, memorably writing in the gonzo adventure style of prior greats like Tim Cahill and Randy Wayne White. Among other feats, he ran a marathon above the Arctic Circle while smoking a pack a day and captained ��ܳٲ��’s Partially Icelandic Quidditch World Cup Team, which ended with him getting carried off the field. He could be serious too, and in 2010 wrote “Amateurs Without Borders,” an account of delivering aid to Haiti by sailboat after that year’s catastrophic earthquake.

In time, Hansen’s humanitarian interests led to a career change: he now writes and runs PR for , the international organization founded by the late . Hansen’s former editor, Elizabeth Hightower Allen, talked to him at his home in New Mexico, where he wore business casual instead of the preferred style of That ’70s Guy: a star-spangled backpack and denim short-shorts.

OUTSIDE: So the concept was to dress you up like an outdoorsy 1970s love machine, send you out into the world, and watch people’s jaws drop, right?
HANSEN: Yes. The editors wanted to see if seventies style still had the power to frighten. And I think they looked around and were like, Do we have a goofball stuntman in the vicinity? Yes, we do. One thing I loved about this story is that there’s virtually no news value. So long as you really got into it, you couldn’t screw it up.

You had to round up some vintage gear, including a T-shirt that said: LOVE MEANS NOTHING TO A TENNIS PLAYER.

Unlike most stories I wrote, I actually did a lot of prep: going to thrift shops, calling gear companies, and rummaging through yard sales. It was a dissociative experience. On the one hand you’re like, This is so fun. On the other hand, it’s deeply humiliating. It’s one thing to paw through the racks, and another to go to a real club in Denver dressed like you just came out of the Hot Tub Time Machine.

How does one prepare to become an adult who does, well, things like this?
I was pretty adventurous, even as a teenager. Growing up in Seattle, there’s so much to do. When we were 15 years old, four buddies and I took the ferry to Vancouver Island and went sea-kayaking for six days. We had no business doing this. I can’t even believe my parents allowed it.

At ��ԹϺ��, a process of elimination came into play. I looked around, saw so many great literary writers, and quickly realized: I can’t write like that, so what’s left? Well, go do something the bookworms wouldn’t, and try to be a little bolder or less prepared or more naive.

Your assignments often required serious athleticism and involved similarly serious risk. In the ’70s Guy piece, you’re doing endoes in kayaks, and you complete a race on a very heavy bike. In other articles you wrote, you skied clear-cuts in southeastern Alaska’s Tongass National Forest and hitchhiked to a remote bar in Colombia. Did you ever worry about the danger?
At the time, I didn’t think there was anything weird about it. I don’t know what I was thinking. I mean, these days I wear a helmet to bike to the grocery store.

Tim Cahill pretty much invented the kind of ��ԹϺ�� story that combines far-flung adventure with bad decision-making. What did you learn about writing from predecessors like him?
Tim gave me some great advice once. I had a column due, and I had nothing on the page. I just couldn’t get started. This happened to me every couple of years—once, I had Chris Solomon, my roommate at the time and a fellow ��ԹϺ�� writer, literally duct-tape me to a chair.

Anyway, I was freaking out, so I drank two beers, thinking that would loosen me up to write. Instead it loosened me up to find Cahill’s phone number on the Web. I left him a message that went something like: “Tim, my name’s Eric. You probably don’t know me, but I write for ��ԹϺ�� and I’m a huge fan. I have a story due tomorrow and I have nothing. Can you help?“

I woke up at probably 6:30 to a phone call. It was Tim, and he did help. He said to just start writing the part you like. Write that, and then write the next part you like. Sure enough, a week later I had a story.

One of my favorites is “Out of My Way, Pumpkin,” about an entirely made-up condition called Skills Deficit Syndrome (SDS) that affects mountain-town relationships. Your girlfriend dusts you at every sport and then dumps you because you can’t keep up.
Well, she dumped me because of other things too, I’m sure!

��But beneath all the high jinks, you often explored substantive issues. You worked for a week as a trekking porter in Nepal and outlined the indignities Western trekkers impose on porters. And you sailed to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

I certainly didn’t go into those stories with an agenda, but I always liked serious takes on comical subjects, and vice versa. One of the things ��ԹϺ�� taught me is to meet the reader where they are, and then take them someplace new. I was very aware that it’s an absolute honor to have people read what you’re writing. And so you really are obliged to entertain while you maintain fidelity to what’s actually happening.

As for Haiti, I’d seen poverty like that before, but it blew my mind that it was so close—the fact that you could get in a little boat and sail to that place. The juxtaposition of Haiti’s deep poverty with its proximity to the U.S. really struck me. That and how disorganized the international aid apparatus was. It was like a crash course in global health. And it got me interested in it as a career.

What do you think ’70s Guy knew that 2020s Guy does not?
First, that you just have to get out there. Most of the gear in your bedroom is good enough for just about any adventure. The important thing is to find the time and go do it. Second, approach it all with love and curiosity.

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E. Jean Carroll Has Some Stories to Tell

jversteegh — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 15:21:57 +0000

On the day in June when I was scheduled to interview E. Jean Carroll, it had been less than a month since she’d won a in New York against Donald J. Trump for sexually assaulting her and defaming her during a widely publicized campaign of verbal abuse. Consequently, the demands on her time had become rather intense. Among her many to-dos:

Dealing with media requests from all over the world.
Writing her column on Substack and cowriting a serial romance novel with —the former president’s niece and a prominent critic of his conduct and politics—while creating an online platform, with her attorney Robbie Kaplan, for women who’ve been sexually assaulted.
Introducing her new rescue dog, a Great Pyrenees beauty named Miss Havisham, to Guff, her sweet old pit bull.
Suing Trump for defamation. Again. After he called her a liar and a “” during a CNN town hall held on May 10, a day after the verdict against him.

Carroll was so busy that it felt like our scheduled interview in upstate New York might not actually happen. I was nine minutes away from her remote mountain cabin when my phone rang.

“Have you already left?”

Uh, yes.

Beat.

“OK then! Meet me at the emergency room!”

Eight minutes later, I greeted her in the ER parking lot. She looked chic in a belted white cargo jumpsuit and black combat boots. On her cheek were a laceration and a purpling bruise.

“I broke up a dogfight,” she said, sounding pretty chipper about it. Guff and Miss Havisham had vigorously disagreed; E. Jean attempted to mediate. One more adventure in a life overflowing with them.

Full disclosure: I’ve known E. Jean Carroll for 35 years, starting when I worked at ��ԹϺ�� in the late 1980s and early ’90s and she wrote for us. Later, from 2013 to 2019, I edited the Ask E. Jean advice column for Elle. I’ve been friends with her long enough to know that she reveres Jane Austen and Joan Didion and is a vegetarian who’d dreamed of being a writer since she was six. But in all that time, she never uttered a word to me about what happened to her in a Bergdorf-Goodman dressing room nearly 30 years ago.

It was only when New York magazine published an from her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, that I learned what she’d been carrying all those years—not just the horrible encounter with Trump, but bad incidents with other men, too. She lived with these traumas even as she hiked the mountains of Papua New Guinea as a writer for Playboy in search of what the magazine unfortunately called “primitive man” and conducted action-packed interviews with Hunter S. Thompson for her 1993 book .

You want gonzo? “I stayed with Hunter two weeks the first time,” she recalls, “and the second time about eight or nine days—before we got into a fistfight and I ran to the phone and dialed a taxi. When the nice lady dispatcher picked up, I screamed, ‘Help! Help! Help!’ And she said, ‘Are you at Hunter’s?’”

I know what Trump’s defamations cost E. Jean, because for 27 years she was a marquee columnist at Elle, providing counsel to women with problems that were sometimes frivolous but more often very serious. And when she spoke out about the primitive man who had sexually assaulted her in Bergdorf’s, she lost her job.

A definition of a resilient person is one who is able to hold contrasting ideas and experiences in her head and continue to live a meaningful life. E. Jean embodies this concept, which is good, as her dispute with Trump is far from over. In late June he countersued, saying that Carroll had acted with malice when, after a jury settled on a lesser charge of sexual assault, she publicly said that he’d raped her. Meanwhile, Carroll has another underway—it involves derogatory statements Trump made while in the White House—that appears to be heading toward a trial.

In New York after the verdict was announced in her civil case against Donald Trump (Photo: Brittainy Newman/The New York Times/Redux)

After all the ER drama was done—two hours, one tetanus shot, and one bottle of antibiotics—we finally went to her home, which is surrounded by a small forest of turquoise-painted trees. “The water-based paint helps them stay strong and grow fat and ward off bugs and look pretty at the same time,” she explained. The house is also fronted by a chartreuse sign in the driveway that warns: BEWARE THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES / SHE IS BIG AND CRAZY.

Inside, books are the central design motif. They overflow the shelves and are stacked in piles on the furniture and the floor. She used to keep some in the oven, until she got rid of the oven. We made a salad with crusty bread and discussed hard work, humor, adventure, and the ways men see, or don’t see, women—all ideas that permeate her 1981 ��ԹϺ�� story, an elegant, hilarious, and seething-just-beneath-the-surface report on a competition and pageant called Miss Rodeo America. The interview features a helpful phone cameo from John Rasmus, ��ԹϺ��’s head honcho during those years and her editor for the story.

OUTSIDE: This piece was published in 1981—that was 42 years ago. Yet it feels like it was written last week.
CARROLL: Jesus. Well, the culture hasn’t changed. It was my first story for ��ԹϺ��. Ten days in Oklahoma City for the Miss Rodeo USA Championships! Nobody in magazines would send you anywhere for ten days now.

RASMUS: In the summer of 1980, I was out in Grand Teton National Park on vacation. Steve Byers—then E. Jean’s husband, and later the editor in chief of Outdoor Life—reached out to me from Montana. He said, “Come to Ennis. My wife is a writer, and this guy David Quammen lives nearby.”

CARROLL: Quammy!

For those who don’t already know: Quammen, a columnist and feature writer for ��ԹϺ�� in the eighties and nineties, did more than anyone in the magazine’s history to define how it covered natural science. He’s the author of many books, including Spillover and, which examine the conditions that led to the COVID-19 pandemic and the development of the vaccines.
RASMUS: I drove up there, and Byers, Quammen, and I had just enjoyed this fantastic day fly-fishing on a creek near the Madison River. We came back for dinner, and E. Jean was described to me as extremely focused on her work: “We may not see her. She writes all day out back in the shed with the spiders.”

CARROLL: Fourteen black widow spiders.

You were 37 when “Cowgirls” was published. What kind of jobs did you have before then?
CARROLL: I was a lifeguard. I was a teacher. I was in Chicago during the riots after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I taught gym there. I taught gym at the girls’ reformatory school in Saint Anthony, Idaho. From the time I was 12, those were the jobs I would take as I filled the mail with pitches to magazines. Nobody hired me, ever.

RASMUS: She proposed “Cowgirls” to us at a point when we were really trying to do more writing-for-good-writing’s sake—going for the humor, energy, and quirkiness that became central to the ��ԹϺ�� brand. She was already very much part of the Montana writing scene in the seventies and eighties, a whole world of people with high ambition and deep literary backgrounds, countercultural and postmodern personas. E. Jean had confidence and star power, and her piece had a stream of consciousness to it. She didn’t explain too much, she just pulled you along for the ride.

Who were your heroes? Who was in your head while you were writing “Cowgirls”
CARROLL: Didion. There’s a lot of Joan Didion in that piece.

There’s a great line in the story where you say to Miss Rodeo Utah, “You look like you’ve won a lot of beauty contests. Have you ever entered one?” When you were in college in the early 1960s, you were a beauty queen yourself, and a cheerleader. What was that like?
CARROLL: At the University of Indiana, I was in a sorority, Pi Phi. They would put us up for these contests as a duty to the sorority—for instance, they told five of us to compete for Miss Indiana University. And all five of us ran up and down the runway. And because I have a large personality, and I love being on stage, and I didn’t mind strutting around in high heels in a bathing suit, and I did a comedy routine for my talent portion, and I thought it was all ridiculous, I won Miss Indiana University. My mother was happy because it got me a paid semester of tuition.

As for Miss Cheerleader USA, the athletic department put me up for it. I found myself in the finals and won the thing. It was fun—you can see in the pictures that I was enjoying myself. There were really beautiful girls in those contests, much prettier than me. But you’ve got to have that sort of oomph. I had the oomph.

The cheerleading champ in 1965 (Photo: Courtesy E. Jean Carroll)

RASMUS: You can just imagine what she was like on the phone when we were talking about the rodeo idea. “Rasmus! I’ve been a cheerleader, I know what this competitive life looks like. These cowgirls are great, they’re strong, they’re beautiful!” She talked William Allard, a famous National Geographic photographer, into doing the shoot for a reduced rate. How could we not do it?

CARROLL: They were real athletes, a real help to their parents on their ranches. They could turn those horses on a dime, because they needed to turn those horses on a dime. If a calf runs off when you’re moving the herd to high grass, you have to know how to handle a horse. They knew how—they were put on horses when they were two and three. Miss Utah took her first naps on her horse.

The story works on two levels. On one hand, it’s a very straight and fun telling of what you saw—the direction the arrows on their form-fitting jackets are pointed, how they handle a horse. But I sense an undercurrent of rage at the way these kinds of competitions diminish the cowgirls’ totality as serious women and athletes—which is what a woman on a horse is.
CARROLL: There was anger in there. I left a lot of stuff out. Three instances in particular made my blood boil. They had a lot of cocktail hours, events that the rodeo queens had to go to with the big boosters from Oklahoma and Texas—guys who were there to meet the queens. I was talking to somebody from Oklahoma, and he said, “Oh, Miss Oklahoma is such an airhead. Don’t even bother talking to her.” That’s how he talked about his own queen. But she was so smart. She was tall, really lean, I think she was at Oklahoma State and may have been going to vet school. Obviously, she had brushed him off.

They also told the queens they had to “loosen up.” And when they were getting ready to go to an event with all the big chicken pluckers from Alabama and such places, they had them parade around these guys in a circle, march around and act like they were having fun, and at the end they were told to yell, “Bullshit!” They made the queens say “bullshit” to get them to loosen up.

What’s the third thing that made your blood boil?
CARROLL: A man who was connected to the officials at the competition, and who was always just around, came up to me on the first or second day I was there, looked me up and down, and said, simply: “No strings.”

Yuck. Do you think your life outside—the years in Montana and the trek in Papua New Guinea, the river expeditions and road trips—was a response in any way to the things that happened to you at the hands of men? Put another way: Did your life outside make you feel less vulnerable to those kinds of men?
CARROLL: Miss Lizzie, long ago, deep in the sticks of Indiana, my ma opened the door, and I ran outside the moment I could walk. I am still outside. Now I am the old crone on the mountaintop. And people are frightened of me.

Lisa Chase started her career as an editor at ��ԹϺ��, then moved to New York and worked for Premiere, The New York Observer, New York, and Elle. She followed her dreams and opened a restaurant in 2020, then followed her gut and closed it in 2023.

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Cowgirls All the Way

jversteegh — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 10:00:01 +0000

There is a horse auction establishment on South MacArthur in Oklahoma City. It’s a big white building with a dirt arena inside.

Actually, there are two arenas, a large one where the horses are exercised and a smaller one that has a stage with seats around it. I mention this place because it was there that the 50 Miss Rodeo America contestants made their first public appearance. They ate the barbecue in the large arena, and then were introduced by state in the small arena with the seats. In the large arena there was an open bar, but the contestants were not allowed to drink.

“They should let us,” said Miss Rodeo Pennsylvania, “to see who gets crocked and who doesn’t.” Then Miss Rodeo Utah introduced herself.

She had on a baby-blue western suit with white leather piping down both pant legs. Her jacket had four white arrows on the back, pointing at her bottom. She had on baby-blue boots, a white ruffled blouse, and a baby-blue cowboy hat. She wore Merle Norman’s Boston Blue eyeshadow, and two hearts held her rodeo sash. She clasped her Miss Rodeo Utah purse in her baby-blue gloves.

“You look like you’ve won a lot of beauty contests,” I said. “Have you ever entered one?”

“No,” she said, “I’m a cowgirl all the way!”

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Latria Graham: Standing Her Ground

jversteegh — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 22:00:58 +0000

This story update is part of the ��ԹϺ�� Classics, a series highlighting the best writing we’ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read “We’re Here. You Just Don’t See Us,” by Latria Graham here.

After reading some of Graham’s writing on a friend’s recommendation, Tracy Ross knew she had to meet her. A Black writer from Spartanburg, South Carolina, Graham has experienced the kinds of racism and aggression that Ross, a white journalist who grew up in Idaho, had never known. Yet Graham fearlessly pushes forward, writing about charged topics of race, class, and social justice, drawing on a lifetime of experience. What emerges in her work are stories of a tragic American past and present, made relatable by an empathetic mind and shared vulnerability. Shortly after meeting Graham, Ross introduced her to ��ܳٲ��’s editors, who quickly embraced her as an important new voice. In various publications, Graham, who is a visiting scholar at Augusta University in Georgia, has probed subjects ranging from a Black falconer who names his birds after people he loves, to Eartha Kitt, to the stigma of being Black and mentally ill, based on Graham’s own battle with depression. She also produced “We’re Here. You Just Don’t See Us,” a powerful essay about why Black Americans have a fraught relationship with the outdoors but still crave deep connections with adventurous settings and the natural world. This 2018 piece—and a follow-up, “Out Here, No One Can Hear You Scream,” published in 2020—led to a book deal for the memoir Uneven Ground, which will be published in late 2024 or early 2025 by Mariner, a division of HarperCollins.

OUTSIDE: Writing about the dynamics of race, class, and social justice for an outdoor magazine seems like a tough assignment. How did you find the balance?
GRAHAM: This story addresses a mistaken idea many people have—that Black people don’t participate in the outdoors. I knew I could present a nuanced perspective based on my lived experience. I grew up in the outdoors. My father was a farmer; I worked at his farm stand. And I’m a hiker, snowshoer, backpacker, cyclist, and more. The data is there. Black people do things in the outdoors. It’s just that on the East Coast and in the South, where the majority of Black Americans live, there are fewer parks than in the West. I wanted people to know that. I refuse to live without sharing knowledge that I know could make someone’s life better.

You say you’ve been a “disciple of landscapes” for as long as you can remember. Disciple really stands out for me. Why did you choose that word?
I think of nature as my life’s church. Nature has a lot to teach us, and it shapes my worldview. Everything in nature is connected. Humans love to forget it, but we’re part of that connection. A disciple is one who is studying, constantly learning. I’ve studied the outdoors for a long time, and even though the word has been claimed by Evangelical Christians, who are mostly Republicans, I wanted to take it back. As someone who has dealt with floods, fires, and tornadoes—all of which display the power and sheer magnitude of nature—I know there’s a higher power. It’s my teacher.

Your descriptions of your childhood home and the characters in it evoke joy for you. In a relatively dark essay, how did it feel to recall those happy things?
“We’re Here” is about showing how my family has been a part of the outdoors for a long time. I wrote some of those passages as a way to celebrate people who aren’t with us anymore. They can no longer engage with this space—it’s a reliquary for them. But I’m going to take this little memory and make it real by putting it in the pages of a magazine. And the essay feels even more powerful to me now because, since I wrote it, I’ve lost the thing that brought me outside in the first place: my father’s farm. I had to auction it off.

I get very sad thinking about that. The farm rooted you to the land.
Yeah. But for a moment in time, I was able to catch this comet in my hands. In the essay, I get to tell you what living and growing up there felt like. And I get to put the people from my life, like my grandma and my aunt, in the story. Their pictures, too. My grandmother had never seen a picture of herself in a magazine, and she died not long after the piece was published.

At one point, you write about your family being “shaped by the soil,” which you say is “red from the violence of southern history.” Is it hard to find beauty in such a horrifying past?
I grew up in a region where a person can be killed for being the wrong color. That’s been the case since 1526, the year Spanish explorers brought the first enslaved people to a colony on the Atlantic coast. But the landscape where those things happened is beautiful and fertile. I’m talking aesthetics, music, food. It all goes back to that dirt, and being able to sustain life in a temperate climate. The South will never be just one thing, and as a writer I’m determined to hold both parts—this entropy—in my hands.

What was it like to write this for ��ԹϺ��? Was there a part of you that thought these people will never get it?
I’ve been doing this explanatory exploration of both social and geographical policy my whole life. For instance, in 2015, when police in North Charleston, South Carolina, killed Walter Scott—a Black man with a traumatic brain injury—no one in my family had ever protested before. I did, and I wrote about it as a way to try and figure out the world I’m in and how I fit. It was like that with ��ԹϺ��. I wanted readers to have a full, accurate picture of what’s going on with Black people and the outdoors. And for anybody who picked up the magazine and invested the time trying to puzzle through this with me, I have total regard.

Was it well received? Do you think people understood it?
Yeah. But I also got death threats. Apparently, some people weren’t able to just take the magazine and throw it in the trash—they had to threaten me. But I’m willing to die standing by my truth, because I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong talking about these things.

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How ��ԹϺ�� Celebrates a Birthday

mbreton — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past four decades,����ԹϺ����has told a lot of incredible stories. From the top of��Everest��to the most remote parts of the��Darien Gap, our reporters and editors have covered the outdoor world like no other publication on the planet. It’s something worth celebrating, so when our 40th anniversary rolled around this year, we went big.

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�����ԹϺ��� Classics Archives - �����ԹϺ��� Online